Buddhist-Meditation-Systematic-and-Practical

length of one's (outstretched) arms. When joined it
should be two or three feet wide. It should be raised
three or four inches at the head end. The
practitioner binds pads on his knees and elbows and
uses pieces of cloth for sliding his hands along the
boards. One begins as in the "small" practice
described above but does not remain on the hands
and knees. The hands are slid along the board and
the arms extended fully, so that the whole of one's
body touches the planks. It is not uncommon to
finish 100,000 of such prostrations in three or four
months. To complete this basic Vajrayana
foundation, one of a group of four practices, (see
Biography and App. II, B), one should worship in
this way one hundred thousand times.
Said Mr. Chen, laughing:
Why is the secret wheel easy to open after this? Even
though the Gelugpas say that it can only be done
through the third initiation, these prostrations are also a
method. When performing them, one shoots all one's
limbs out, thus using the all-pervading energy, and the
center of this energy is in the secret wheel.
f. When this center is open and this energy becomes
strong, then the outermost knot around the heart-wheel
is relaxed, and the heart-wheel itself becomes easy to
open.
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